Utopia thinking:

• Education would be a tool to form society. Raising by working for classes, Owen understood well about the negative influence of industrial revolution: the tragic impact of the oppressive working condition, the deterioration of body and mind attributable to the epidemic of disease, accidents in factories and mills, and particularly the treadmill-like, barren existence of the poor. He believed that the social reform is a steady process, and the only one feasible means of effecting such change is good, universal education which the government had the duty and power to make available.

• Education should begin with children because their minds are more pliable than adults, whose habits and characters have been more fixed and hard to change.  Those training about habits and behaviors patterns, though can be taught and accepted though all ages,  is much easier and effective if started at young ages. From the book, Robert Owen as Educator, it claims that Owen asserted that an orderly more humane society could readily be created by teaching every young person to conduct himself in a socially approved manner. ^[1] In Owen’s own journal in 1851, he wrote that “ It must be evident that  upon reflection that a human being well trained and educated from birth, physically, intellectually, morally, and practically, will be a far more valuable product to the world than one entirely neglected in these respects or ill- educated in all or any of them.” ^[2][1] Altfest, Owen as Educator, 41.

  ^[2]Robert Owen, Robert Owen’s Journal: Explanatory of the Means to Well-Place, and Well-feed, Well-Clothe, Well-Lodge, Well-Employ, Well-Educate, Well-Govern, and Cordially Unite, the population of the world, Vol III, No. 57(Nov. 29, 1851), p. 23.

• From this thoughts, Owen started character education center and infant school for New Harmony and new Lanark.

• Focusing on subject education in New harmony. A innovation, in school system of new Harmony from Maclure, was the organization of an industrial department to provide training in taxidermy, printing, carpentry, dressmaking, cabinet-making, shoemaking, and other trade. Also, the teaching of science was given much more attention in New Harmony than had been the case at New Lanark, from the influence of Maclure’s initiative and interest. In 1826 many scientists and scholars arrived to join the community, so many, in fact, that their ship was referred to as the “Boatload of Knowledge”, and after that, New Harmony served as a meeting place for scientists from all parts of the world.